On early influencesProf Sue Black kicked off the night, with anecdotes about her job, her childhood in Scotland, and travelling to some of the most war-torn places in the world. “It doesn’t matter where you start from,” she said. “What matters are the decisions you make, the journey you take and the passengers you take with you.” Taking her first job at 12 – because of her parents’ “strong work ethic” – Prof Black started out in a butcher’s shop. “We used to love it when the lorry came up from the abattoir, especially if it was bringing livers,” she said. “They had to be fresh, which meant they were warm, so you could stick your hands in the buckets of liver and it would just warm you up.” It therefore came as no surprise to learn that when she went to university she was rather good at human anatomy.

Today her job is mostly about repatriation. “It’s about bringing people home to people who are missing them,” whether that’s in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq or Thailand. “Our job is about identification, it’s about dignity, decency and respect for those who have lost their lives. It’s also about serving justice.”

Annie Nightingale speaking at the Royal Geographical Society, 12 March 2015. Photograph: James Turner/Guardian

Annie Nightingale – Radio 1’s first female DJ

On perseveranceFor Annie Nightingale it all started when she saw the film Roman Holiday aged 14, but not because she identified with Audrey Hepburn. “Gregory Peck was a reporter,” she said, “and I really liked the idea of that freedom.” From there she got a job on the Brighton & Hove Herald (as the only girl in the office). Nightingale went on to work on other newspapers and television, all the while listening to music, particularly the pirate stations. Having worked in male-dominated environments she thought nothing of asking for a job as a DJ at BBC Radio 1 when it launched. She was turned down because she was female and that the station’s DJs were “husband substitutes”. The station, she said, had an entrenched position and it took years to change. “I was running a campaign in various magazines and I just kept on and on and on, and the feeling grew and eventually they had to give me a go,” she said.

“The lesson is if there’s something you really want to do, it’s not just being in the right place at the right time, you have to hang in there until the right time comes along. My message would be to have an optimistic, glass half-full attitude towards life and never take no for an answer.”

Judith Kerr speaking at the Royal Geographical Society, 12 March 2015. Photograph: James Turner/Guardian

Judith Kerr – critically acclaimed children’s writer and illustrator of classics, including The Tiger Who Came to Tea

On war and motherhoodJudith Kerr left Germany as a child when the Nazis came to power, spending time in Switzerland and France before settling in England. “The war was when I really became British,” she said. “These people were incredibly tolerant. We lived here all through the London blitz and there were people being killed every night. My parents still had very noticeable accents and no one ever said anything nasty to them.” She recalled the categories for foreigners (who were known as aliens). “There were enemy aliens and there were friendly aliens, and then there were people like my family who were known to be anti-Nazi but German, so we were friendly enemy aliens.”

Married and settled in the UK, Kerr said that she would never have written any books had it not been for her children. “I stayed at home for seven years looking after my children and I think that was partly extremely boring but also absolutely fascinating,” she said. “You think you know about death and then your child asks: ‘What is death?’ and you have to rethink an awful lot of things.” Was motherhood an inspiration? “Motherhood is as good as any other job,” she said.

Breaking the cycle of FGMNimko Ali recorded a film to show at the event because she was at the UN campaigning to raise awareness of FGM. “I had FMG when I was seven years old,” she said. “I didn’t speak about it until I was in my early 20s when I helped found Daughters of Eve and tried to campaign with the UK government.

The only reason I had FGM was because I was a girl; it had nothing to do with my culture or my race and I assumed that the rest of the world would catch up.” But something happened in 2006. “I walked into a school in Bristol where out of the 13 girls I spoke to, 12 had undergone FGM. That day made a real impact on me because I understood that my silence was complicit in FGM.”

And the figures are staggering. The rate of FGM in Somalia is 98% and this translates into the diaspora and cities in the UK. In Egypt it’s 91%, with 75% being medicalised because FGM hasn’t been framed as violence against women. In places such as Indonesia and Malaysia it’s almost 100% because it’s been normalised. Ali wants to end FGM in a generation. “Once the cycle has been broken, it’s broken for ever,” she said. “For me it was looking at my niece Sophia who is four. She’s the first girl in my family not to be cut. We’ve broken the cycle.”

Jung Chang speaking at the Royal Geographical Society, 12 March 2015. Photograph: James Turner/Guardian

Jung Chang – author of the best-selling books: Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China; and Mao: The Unknown Story

On coming to LondonJung Chang left China in 1978, studying first in London then in Yorkshire, becoming the first person from the People’s Republic of China to be awarded a PhD from a British university. “There were so many rules,” Chang said. “One thing in particular was that we weren’t allowed to go into an English pub because the Chinese translation for pubs in those days suggested somewhere with nude women gyrating. Of course I was torn with curiosity, so one day I sneaked out of college and ran across the road into the pub, and of course I saw nothing of the kind – I was rather disappointed.”

But writing wasn’t her original plan. “I didn’t want to write,” she said. “To write would be to look inward and backward to a past I wanted to forget.” But in 1988 Chang’s mother came to stay with her in London and told her all about her childhood and her family. “Once my mother started she couldn’t stop. I had a tape recorder and I interviewed her, and when I was out working my mother interviewed herself.” By the time she went back to China, Chang’s mother had left her daughter 60 hours of recordings. “When I was listening to them I said to myself: ‘I’ve got to write this down,’ and then I realised how much I had always wanted to be a writer.”

However, to be a writer in China was to enter a most dangerous profession. “I wrote my first poem on my 16th birthday in 1968,” she said. “I heard the door banging; my father’s persecutors had come to raid the flat so I had to tear it up and flush it down the toilet, ending my first literary attempt. In the years after I was writing in my head with an invisible pen, I just couldn’t put pen to paper. It was like my mother knew I’d had this dream and she found a way of making that happen.”

The guests were speaking at a Guardian Live event at the Royal Geographical Society on 12 March. Guardian Live is our series of talks, debates and interviews exclusively for Guardian members. Find out more about Guardian Membership and how to sign up.